Back in 2008 when I was a struggling newlywed in a new city and a new husband who flirted with hoarding more than he flirted with me…
A new husband who left snotty tissues all over the coffee table and stuffed in the couch cushions and then got offended when I cleaned them up…
Who wouldn’t throw away a single piece of paper that came into the house, ever, and didn’t like it when I did either…
Who, when we inevitably got a mouse, named it Mortimer and started leaving it peanut butter crackers and bits of cheese…
Who tried to justify saving pizza boxes by saying, with a serious face, that we could use them to make furniture…
Let’s just say I struggled. It was all overwhelming.
Add on a major depressive episode and… yeah. It was bad.
But I was really big into the blogging scene back then, and eventually I came across a blog called A Slob Comes Clean.
I liked this author.
She was funny and practical and pretty relatable.
I read through a ton of her archives and ended up picking up a few techniques and approaches that have stuck with me ever since.
Recently, I saw her name mentioned on Reddit, so I looked her back up.
She’s turned her little practice blog into quite a bit of a business for herself, and she’s written several books for “the rest of us” who want to declutter and get organized but are also easily distracted and/or don’t have tons of spare time on our hands.
And as I’m in the process of rebuilding my life — and reclaiming my home from the mountains of stuff that have accumulated over the years — I decided to give her books a listen.
The first one I’m working my way through is called How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind.
And it’s great.
Not everything will work for me, but that’s kind of the point.
In the first few chapters of the book, Dana writes about figuring out your daily non-negotiables.
She has her suggestions for which tasks to make daily, why they should be non-negotiable, and what it will be like to live in a home where these tasks are done daily.
If you can just get to the third day, she says, you will see for yourself.
The first day has all the drama.
The second day has all the irritation of having to do the task again after spending all day yesterday on it.
The third day is when you begin to notice the benefits of only having one day’s worth of stuff to work on… how fast it goes, how much easier it makes everything else go, blah blah.
These daily non-negotiables build the foundation for your entire rest of your day. And once you’ve established the habit of one, you move on to the next.
But it all hinges on doing the task every single day.
Otherwise the system goes into breakdown.
You’re back in catch-up mode. But also, you’re back in failure mode.
There’s now MORE pressure on you, internally and externally… not less. But less pressure is the goal.
But the only way to create less pressure is to do the thing every day.
There’s something that feels psychologically intimidating about doing something every single day.
We think it’s gonna be a big freaking deal, a heavy lift, a burden.
But making something non-negotiable actually reduces the bigness of the thing.
You no longer have to weigh and measure and decide. There is none of that mental load.
You just have to DO.
Once you’re truly committed… it becomes second nature to just do the thing.
Soon you start to feel off if you miss a day.
And it becomes easy to recommit because you realize how much easier it is when you remove the option of doing it.
It’s true about washing dishes, and it’s true about daily emails.
Make doing the thing non-negotiable, and it becomes significantly easier to do it.
That’s it. That’s the secret.
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